Crude & Awkward: Educational Forms & Teacher 2.0

In a recent panel I chaired at National Council of Teachers of English entitled LEARNING LITERATE LIVES: 21ST CENTURY LITERACY SKILLS BEYOND INDIVIDUAL TECHNOLOGIES with Shelley Rodrigo, Chad Sansing, and William Kist, the discussion revolved around grass roots educational reform in terms of trying to move beyond the catch phrase “21st century learning” towards what that REALLY means. In November 2008, during Marc Prensky’s keynote from NCTE in San Antonio, he discussed how the taxonomies must shift from the nouns of Bloom’s 1956 model towards a “verbed” model where CREATING is shifted to the top. This same concept, for me, applies to technology tools. Educators want to take these shiny tech tools and try to shove them into the tired, regurgitated pedagogical paradigms. But that’s not effective. We can’t just grab the most recent cool Web 2.0 app and use it in our classes for the sake of using it. It doesn’t work, no matter how hard we’ve tried.

I’ll admit it; I’ve done it. I’ve said “let’s do this project” and “here’s the tool!” The kids groan, and I groan later… the reason I groan is because suddenly this cool shiny tool does NOT work! We use to love utterli.com and used it for maybe a year in a half until, during one project, it just died. I contacted the Utterli people who ignored me. I checked their Twitter feed that looked dead. My kids complained. They emailed me and each other, over and over. Nothing I could. I moved away from Utterli (if you find anything that can replace Utterli, tell me). I then tried another awesome tool I loved one called Xtimeline.com. Guess what? It worked very well until I asked 100 students to use it during the same week! It died. Same deal. Next up, Capzles.com. Some things worked very well but then we found bugs. The “CEO” would answer emails and sounded great. This lasted a week. After that, he stopped responding to my (very respectful) questions/emails. This is what happens.

Teacher 2.0

So what do we do? We need to stop giving them these tools. Yes, I think I said that. Let’s start with the notion of US. Who are we? Who must we be? This blog is called Teacher 2.0 because we need a pedagogical reboot. Most of us are our own tech support, our own pedagogical experts, and our own content area authorities. By wearing all three hats, this becomes more difficult for us. Beyond teaching we, often, are required to teach to the test, chair committees, sponsor clubs, etc… And all of this beyond actually teaching.

cc image posted on Wikipedia by Punya Mishra on February 15, 2009

I call us Teacher 2.0. Not all of us, but the ones who “get it” and really try to become the center of the above diagram. Those of us in these discussions and care about our kids. It’s frustrating to be Teacher 2.0 because we have several challenges: 1) our IT department hates us because we’re the squeaky wheel who wants to get to websites that we hear work well but they filter them because they over filter and have unfounded fears of CIPA, 2) our class building colleagues who roll their eyes when we talk tech (like the teacher down the hall who wants to install a cell phone blocker in his classroom for his students!), or 3) our admin who don’t understand the technology updates because they’ve focused so long on either the pedagogical perspective or (god forbid) the management perspective of running a school. It’s hard to be a teacher in this world, and, too often, one of three things happens: 1) they give up and revert to Teacher 1.0, 2) they give up on teaching k-12 and shift to college/university (less filters, less big brother evals), or 3) they quit teaching all together. The last one is terrible because we lose some of our greatest teachers in our public schools every single day. Henry Giroux, critical and pedagogy theorist, in response to how teachers are currently being portrayed (read: lambasted) in the media and corporate American, argues that “Once eager public servants [teachers] in the fight for equality and justice, teachers are now forced to play with a severe handicap, as if assembled on a field blindfolded and gagged” (October 5, 2010). I have no idea why we placate the negativity thrust upon us. Is it through a mutual fear? We fear what education has become. The powers that be fear that eventually we teachers won’t continue our placated subservience towards the corporatized, politicized educational fruitcake system.

As I wrote that last bit I was about to make a caveat about not trying to sound conspiratorial and negative, but then I’d be sugar coating our current system. I won’t do that. What I will do is shift to a definition of today’s Student 2.0.

Student 2.0

A gap has emerged between the way teachers think and the way students think. The difference between the way we, the native immigrants work, and the way the digital natives learn are vast: they work at twitch speed (how fast their fingers move on cell phones or gaming joysticks), they randomly access information instead of linearily, they parallel process data, they read graphics first, and they are just truly more connected. People toss around terms for various generations. Don Tapscott calls current undergrads, high schoolers, and middle schoolers NetGen (TK) while Marc Prensky calls them digital natives (many people find this term problematic, and typically that focuses on class-based situations); I suggest the students a few years older than my own child in elementary and younger are now the iGeneration (or iGen, if you must). What makes these kids iGen is not knowledge or capabilities but it is attitude and comfort level. While GenX educators (and even those of us on the cutting edge of Teacher 2.0) tend to keep a foot in the past (like the people who print emails and edit research work by printing it and writing on the paper), don’t necessarily instinctively go to the internet first, don’t naturally share their public profiles, make assumptions that real life happens offline, and believe our pedagogical practices are effective, while our students are metaphoric rockets; they go at hide speed, they’re volatile, they’re headed places unknown, they need good programming and good payload, they may require mid course corrections, and they have an enormous potential payoff. Teacher 2.0 is scared, Teacher 1.0 ignores this shift, the administration sweeps this under the carpet, the test makers just want to make their money, and the politicians wants to filter education funds elsewhere.

Together we all need to realize student 2.0 are those who want to consume and create in the digital age.

cc image created and posted on Flickr by Devon Christopher Adams on November 17, 2010

Crude & Awkward

In closing, some technology tools last a few years while others last only a few months. Educators need to be aware that these tools disappear too quickly for us to really engage with them pedagogically. This scares teachers. Email has been considered for “old people” as far back as late 2007. What’s next to go? Our capabilities, mindsets, and activities need to change because technology evolves daily.

Teacher 1.0 and way too many of our IT departments and administrators make excuses that we don’t use the technology because:

We don’t have time.
It produces poor work.
Where’s the evidence it works?
We don’t have computers.
It doesn’t help students pass the test.
Kids will cheat.

Kids will cheat. Why do today’s teachers generalize this notion of using technology to cheat? This is profound because today’s students need to learn HOW to find knowledge and information rather than worrying about how they find that knowledge. Student 2.0 are not just using technology differently, they are reshaping their entire lives with technology. Students have online ways of communicating, sharing, buying/selling, exchanging, learning, meeting, gaming, coordinating, evaluations, collecting, creating, evolving, searching, analyzing, reporting, programming, etc…. Today’s student is a different beast than their predecessors: US, Generation X (for the most part) teachers. We, as teachers, formerly used our own personal, younger experiences to relate to our students, but this generation is different. We can’t do that now. What do we do? How do we reform education? We don’t need educational reform, we need new educational forms. And with these discussions, I hope we find them.

Here I’ll borrow William Kist’s silent film metaphor. The silent film format was cutting edge and brand new a century ago; no one knew what the next step was and no one knew where this all was headed. Those filmmakers were rudimentary, they were “crude and awkward”. Flash forward a hundred years and we have 3D television technology for our living rooms and watch film leap out at us from 15 story movie screens. Sure educational reform may take 100 years but I’m ready to start now. This is grass roots; Teacher 2.0 like you and me are the pioneers, and, I don’t know about you, but I am ok being called crude and awkward.

So here I am at my 4th NCTE. Been a member since 1999 (think Nashville), but didn’t begin really attending until San Antonio when we really began to try to wrap our brains around 21st Century learning and Student 2.0. Then it was my colleague Ian and me, sharing a room, meeting some awesome people, and listening to Marc Prensky talk about his “digital natives” notion. Now two years later I’ve presented a few times and will again in a couple of hours. Last time I rode to coattails, this time I chaired the panel. We work with some awesome people here.

cc image posted on Flickr by Trey Ratcliff.

As I began to prep for today I wanted to really get beyond the idea of forcing the shiny tech tool into a shriveled pedagogical paradigm (most of that discussion will take place on my Google site at: bit.ly/verbingthenouns. The more I read, wrote, and thought about how teachers today need to learn to teach to students today, the more I realized most of us probably don’t even know how to do it – and those are the good ones. By that I mean, those of us who care, aren’t sure how to do it and have been discussing it heavily for two years. Other teachers don’t understand there’s an issue at all. And for me that’s an issue.

In Novemember at NCTE I headed into a session where PJ Haarsma, the author of The Softwire series, was presenting on Science Fiction and Gaming in the High School Classroom. I was hoping to have PJ sign his up and coming book The Softwire: Wormhole Pirates on Orbis 3. When I walked in, Jim Blasingame, ASU professor and presentation chair, welcomed me, shook my hand, and told me that he wanted me to join the panel. I was surprised, but eager. I joined PJ, Jim, Pete, and a teacher named Kristina on a panel to discuss how to use video games to get kids excited about reading science fiction.

PJ discussed what he and Jim calls the simulated literary experience (SLE), and that reminded me of how we now see more and more trailers for books, instead of just movies. PJ uses video games to hook readers, and he and Dr. Goggin suggest that we need to redefine “literacy”. Literacy is now whatever we want it to be as creator and consumer. We cannot define literacy as just the ability to read and write; literacy in the 21st century included images, audio and video, too (for example see Gee 2003).

The concept of multimodal composition isn’t a new one, but a colleague and I have been developing courses at Mesa Community College that move beyond the traditional formal papers and more into the 21st century multimodal realms.

In what quickly became my portion of the panel presentation, I discussed the use of wikis to generate collective intelligence lexicons based on Haarsma’s The Softwire Series; of (when) the students generate the lexicon, PJ hopes to publish it in the rear of the paperback in March 2009. I just need to better motivate the students to become excited about this entire endeavor. I am also excited that on another level, this may lead to other presentation and publications for us. The power of technology used to increase youth literacies is exciting.

A couple weeks after that presentation, my name popped up on the grid here. I didn’t know the video from the presentation was online. Here it is.

In a session about the public profile as a literary genre. The presenter is talking about Facebook, and she mentioned it’s origins. I guess her son went to the Ivy league, so she truly knows where this all began. There are about 75-100 people in here, and I am concerned about the “random” public profiles she’s pulled up here in the session. And as I type this, I know that this is the point to part of this presentation.

Students understand that employers will look at their FaceBook, but they don’t think their MySpace profiles are viewed. She said MySpace is “raunchier” and she was surprised that older people are the largest group on MySpace, but I didn’t think this was surprising. There are voyeurs who search for the spectacle and they find it. Some people create one FaceBook or MySpace with their real name for employer’s to find while they create a second account for their “real” stuff.

She uses FaceBook for her classes, too. She posts everything from her BlackBoard or Angel CMS classes to FaceBook, too because the kids are there. They barely log in elsewhere (i.e., they’d prefer to be somewhere more social). Teachers use to just want to be the sage on the stage, but being on places like FaceBook make undergraduates feel the professors are more accessible. We, teachers, were never their friends before. Now they engage with us more when we are “human”.

I personally have a FaceBook account, and I made it to better connect with my students. We were in Europe together and most of the student travelers with me had accounts. My wife and I set up accounts immediately. I know my audience, and even though I also connect with colleagues, family and friends there, I do keep it completely PG. I sometimes let my political or religious proclivities emerge there, but they are subtle and innocent.

Students Generating online communities: How they teach us & how that shapes pedagogy by js Miller. (Check out her LBST 499 @ english.iup.edu/sjmiller)

Miller began by having us examine the spaces in which we inhabit. The room we were sitting in was very neutral and drab. Moving into her discussion, she began discussing how she sends her students out into the world to find culture to which they can respond. (Side not: she seems pretty savvy, but she uses overheads?!)

How can students effectively synthesis classroom learning in groups in an online environment? What is the efficacy of such skills to first space (Soja, 1996), the read and concrete spaces, in their lives? Online communities are third spaces. She has students develop abilities to critically read spaces through color analysis, archetypal analysis, spatial mapping, critical literacy, literary criticism, and the application of course discussions and readings. She begins by defining pop culture with the students. She’s at IUP, so one of the groups on which they focused was sports fans (Steelers, Penguins, etc…). Another was Bar Culture, including gay bars & rural bars.

She said we live in a “remix culture”. They all have wikis, and they have to go online and rework each other’s spaces. She’s talking about the makeup of the class, and how it mutated in the class itself. The students were required to go further and further into certain spaces, and explore how popular culture creates subcultures such as raves, goths, punks and counter cultures. The students became cognizant of relationships among disciplines and consider the advantages and disadvantages of both.

The class required students to create a blog, complete observational reflections, attendance at 5 popular culture events, build a wiki, write a synthetic essay, and obviously attend and participate in the course.

She showed us the course blog (blogger), and how she would post blog questions, and then the students would post comments. The next site was a geocaching wiki from her students; and some of that work is found under “placesspacesandposers” through pbwiki.com. Someone in the audience was worried about students “breaking” each other’s wikis. Miller said the expectations are laid out earlier in the class. The second wiki she showed was from Pegasus, a gay dance club in Pittsburgh and discussed the group of students who were comparing the economy of bar culture and contrasting that space with a rural bar in Indiana, PA.

Curricularly, she uses Baudrillard’s Simulacra & the Encyclopedia of Youth Culture. Now it seems like they’re moving into a Q&A, and some people look like their heads are popping off.

The most exciting presenter I saw in the program is Marc Prensky, who has been writing and speaking on “Digital Natives” now for a few years. Some of my colleagues think he’s old hat, and I wondered what his topic would be today. He mentioned his most recent book called Don’t Bother Me Mom, I’m Learning about how kids interactive video games to learn more. The only place where I really hesitate when discussing Prensky is that he does own a company now that develops and sells games, so, in part, he is a sales man, but hey, if his games help kids learn then who cares?

Kylene Beers, the NCTE president, invited several of these digital natives to introduce Marc Prensky. The kids on the stage were from San Antonio Communications & Arts high school and discussed briefly who they are from graphic designer to web designer to photographer, and all finished by stating “I am a digital native”. Prensky asked them to stay on stage with him and be his “ground truth”–essentially agree or disagree with what he said based on their own experiences. Prensky gave his own background, and then introduced his most recent book on video games and how students learn.

Prensky said that all of the current Web 2.0 tools will be replaced within five years, and we as teachers should be afraid because the shifting changes of these tools are too quick for a large number of us. A recent title in The Chronicle of HIgher Education is that “Email is for Old People”. These tools become outdated, and we need to use the emerging technologies to better engage students. They are no longer engaged in the old ways anymore. The tasks of DOING, or game-playing, multi-tasking bring up all forts of new abilities that many of us, the digital immigrants, do not have. Our capabilities, mindsets, and activities need to change because technology evolves daily.

Some of the top reasons Prensky shared on why we DO NOT use technology included:

We don’t have time.
It produces poor work.
Where’s the evidence it works?
We don’t have computers.
It doesn’t help students pass the test.
Kids will cheat.

The last one was the most profound because we need to teach more about HOW to find knowledge and information rather than worrying about how they find that knowledge. Prensky said that he’s seen programs where students are giving “open phone” tests. He advocates for these”open phone” tests because it is not cheating if you redefine how to seek out and find information. . “Most of tests are open phone tests – you [teachers] just don’t know it”, one student was overheard stating.

Young people are not just using technology differently, they are reshaping their entire lives with technology. Students have online ways of communicating, sharing, buying/selling. exchangings, learning, meeting, gameing, coordinating, evaluations, collecting, creating, evolving, searching, analyzing, reporting, programing, etc…. No longer are our digital natives “little US’s” anymore. We, as teachers, use to be able to use our own younger experiences to relate to our students, but this generation is different. We can’t do that now.

Marc Prensky

By the age of 21, todays’ digital natives have spent between 5-10,000 hrs on video games, sent 250,000 emails & IMs, have spent 10,000 hours on cell phones, 20,000 hours on TV and YouTube (most on YouTube), and have viewed 500,000 commercials. BUT they’ve read less than 5,000 paper books. Each year these same digital natives have downloaded 2 billion ringtones per year and downloaded 2 billion songs per month. They’ve also sent 6 billion text messages each day. (Prensky jokingly added “most of them from our classrooms”.) He wrote an article called “Engage Me or Enrage Me”, engagement is changing. There’s a gap emerging between the way teachers think and they way students think are completely changing. The difference between the way we, the native immigrants work, and the way the digital natives are different from us include: they work at twitch speed (how fast their fingers move on cell phones or gaming joysticks, they randomly access information instead of linearily, they parallel process data, they read graphics first, and they are just truly more connected.

Marc’s 3 1/2 year old son Sky is the same age as my own daughter, Claire. He showed information on how Sky uses digital books, handheld games, music, and a Nintendo DS (I never bought my kid a Nintendo DS so I feel like I am a terrible dad right now!)

What makes a kid a digital native? Knowledge? Capabilities? NO Attitude? YES Comfort Level? YES. While digital immigrants always keep a foot in the past, like the people who print emails. Digital immigrants don’t instinctively go to the Internet FIRST. Immigrants do not share naturally, we think “Knowledge is Power”. We assume real life only happens offline, and we think the way WE learning to do things is the right (worse) way.

Our kids are metaphoric rockets; they go at hide speed, they’re volatile, they’re headed places unknown, they need good programming and good payload, they may require mid course corrections, and they have an enormous potential payoff.

Prensky said it’s time to replace these terms of digital immigrants/digital natives. We can call this person (who requires digital tools to work) homosapien digital or the digital wise person. Digital Wise Person, the future of “wisdom” and what it means to be human are enhanced by the digital when the brain and digital tools are combined. Technology enhances our physical capacities, our understanding, our wisdom.

We now need to think of technology not in terms of nouns (PowerPoint, Email, Wikipedia) but now we need to think in terms of verbs (Presenting, Communicating, Learning) because the nouns change rapidly while the verbs do not. I found this relatively profound because we cannot keep up with the nouns, but we can find ways to make the verbs happen in our classes, learning, and teaching. Although, using digital technology doesn’t automatically lead to wisdom; digital natives need to find ways to learn rather than just learn. Teachers can no longer teach; we need to guide them in their own learning. This is a more engaging way to do it. Prensky calls this “partnering” (and is writing a book on it). 21st century pedagogy is a move from Lecture/Controller to Guide/Partner relationships. Einstein said we don’t try to teach anything, but instead we create the environment where they can learn. Moreover, peer to peer teaching is really important. How do we encourage it in our classes?

Another thing Prensky mentioned when talking about where these students learn and also teach each other is in YouTube, which he says is amazingly important because it’s changed the way the world communicates because of: volume, range, direction (textual and visual feedback), and reach. Many of the problems I hear about over and over again is the filters that exists at our own schools to block sites like YouTube. There are thousands (if not millions) of teachers who are completely frustrated with the filters, so why aren’t we speaking up? Why aren’t we railing against the administrators and showing them how the are cutting on 21st century technology at the knees? What can we do? Tell me, and we can try to do it.

The role of technology is suppose to create a new paradigm of students learning on their own. Technology CANNOT support old, undifferentiated curriculum. And teachers themselves are a technology. We need to help students learn HOW to solve future problems. Before technology can help us, we need to move to a new paradigm. We need to change the way we teach. The new paradigm can set us free, change the paradigm and then use the technology to take off. To use the technology, we need to share the work. Let students do what they do well, and we evaluate the quality because we know how to. We cannot stand up in front of our students and use the cool new technologies; we need to give the technology to the students to use for themselves and help them learn how to use the technologies.

Now longer can a dichotomy exist where students learn the old, static, locked down, unchanging ways of pedagogy until the 3PM bell rings, and then they’re released to move outside of our bordered, walled classes to the borderless, UNFILTERED “classroom” where they pull out their cell phones, boot their wireless laptops in the world of free wireless and information at their fingertips.

In terms of 21st century literacies, in the next ten years we will see Increased Global Interaction, hyper localism, extreme diversity and increased out of school learning. In terms of diversity, it’s not just race anymore. It’s play out in age, gender, and even extreme religious views on education. Dale Allender’s, the director of NCTE-West, mentioned that age is an extreme diversity issue we will see in the college classrooms as move further into the 21st century classroom. This concept is intriguing because this will shift how our classrooms are going to look. In an age of stem cell research and DNA mapping, our population will grow older and older. A larger gap will grow in our classrooms, and we need to find new ways to connect people.

According to NCTE, 21st century readers and writers need to:

*develop proficiency with the tools of technology
*build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
*design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
*manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
*create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
*attend to the ethical responsiblities required by these complex environments

This list is much more about the content than the connections. Many of my colleagues at the college and high school levels both complain that they don’t have time to teach skills when they need to teach content and concepts. I assert that these skills will be life long talents–cross curricular and beyond the classroom–and, in many ways, more important than the content of that course.